Swiss File Knife (SFK) : Treasure Chest of Command Line Tools

Those of you who love to work with the command line tools to get things done more efficiently and faster than hopping through the GUI windows in your PC, you would love the Swiss File Knife (SFK). It is a treasure chest of a number of command line tools built inside just one executable. You can use this tool in all versions of Windows starting from Windows XP to Windows 10, Mac OS X and Linux. According to the official documentation, it packs more than a hundred command line tools in just one file.

Swiss File Knife is available in two editions – free and commercial. The free edition is exactly like the paid edition, only it lacks working with the compressed archives like ZIP, TAR etc. The download is available as a single file sfk.exe that can be invoked from inside a command line prompt window. You cannot use this tool from inside a Windows PowerShell CLI.

If you give the command SFK, it will show you a big list of all the commands supported by the Swiss File Knife. All these commands are categorized in various groups like file system commands, conversion commands, text processing commands, search and compare commands, networking commands, scripting commands, development commands, diverse commands, and the help commands.

Among the networking commands are included an inbuilt HTTP server and FTP server. These are very useful when you have to start an adhoc HTTP or FTP server to access files on your PC from another device, or if you have to test your local websites quickly. Of course, it is a very basic web server and does not support all the bells and whistles like the ones in Apache web server or Nginx server.

Conclusion: Swiss File Knife can prove to be very very productive and time saving tool in the hands of people who love to work with the old fashioned command line interfaces. It packs 100+ tools in a small 1.8 MB file including a web server and FTP server.